Hello!

I have been spending the past week trying to get Slackware on to an old HP Omnibook 800

I just bought a CDROM module which you place in a external caddy and it should be accessable - the problem it isn't!

I orginally had Slackware 9.1 on the HDD, but I just formatted the drive as there was a fault with one of the superblocks. I thought I should be able to mount the CDROM and reload Slackware from there, but it isn't working!

Im currently using the latest version of TOMRTBT (downloaded today!) and although I could mount the HDD to fdisk and then create a new filesystem, I can't get it to mount the CDROM.

Error messages are:

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom -t iso9660
mount: mount point /mnt/cdrom does not exist

mount /dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom
mount: /dev/hdb is not a valid block device

My question is is there a certain name I should be giving this device e.g. hdd, cdrom etc and how do I add something to the fstab so that it will accept that a device exists?

Any help gratefully accepted!

Yours

F0ul Oli

Your first error is caused by there not being a directory /mnt/cdrom. Create one ('mkdir -p /mnt/cdrom'). Try mounting again.

did that now I'm getting a different error!

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom -t iso9660
mount: special device /dev/cdrom does not exist

what command should I send it to make it look for it?

thanks for your help!

Oli

Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Please do: 'dmesg | grep -i cd', and if that doesn't return anything obvious, try 'dmesg | grep ide' and 'dmesg | grep hd'. If in doubt, post the output of them all here.

That was interesting ( what was I doing by the way?!!)

grep ide gave me
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
grep hd gave me the details of the hard drive

I was looking through the DEV directory and couldn't find anything to do with CDROM. What was the old name for CDROM before it was known as CDROM? Was it something like HDB or SCD0?

Oli

It depends on how your cdrom is connected. Is the external caddy connected via usb? If so, you probably need 'scsi cd' support.

'dmesg' is the kernel ring buffer... basically, the last 16/32/64 (depending on config) k of kernel messages.

Sorry been a while getting back to you - real life gets in the way sometimes!

The CDROM fits into an external caddy which is conected by a propriatory connector ( I don't think its a SCSI port) on the side of the laptop. its not a USB port although there is a USB port on the laptop.

I now understand what you were getting me to do. The drive does spin up on bootup, it just doesn't attempt to load anything even though the BIOS is asking it to do so.

Does the dmesg hold info on everything that has been touched during the start up? would it be easier just to load the whole thing up and check it manually or is that too big a task?

Oli

dmesg should contain pretty much everything since boot. Mine does, shortly after booting:

I've just been reading up and it seems this might well have a SCSI CDROM.

What is the dev name for a CDROM?

is it something like /dev/scd0 or is there another device name I can use?

Oli

/dev/scd0. Did you see anything with 'dmesg | grep -i cd'?

Dmesg didn't bring up anything about SCSI

I started thinking that maybe I need to use another bootdisk with a SCSI2 driver on it.

The research I've done on this CD seems to point to it being a SCSI2 device which is a bit tempremental at the best of times!

I have bought the whole Slack Pack from Slackware so I will not have the full version of Slackware 10.1 - I'm assuming it comes with a boot floppy, so I'll use TMRTBT to clean the current hdd and start again - although it would be nice to just get the cd working before this!

Is it possible that the problem lies with the fact that there is two different versions of Linux on my system (Slack and Tom's RooT) ?

So many questions, so little time!!


F0ul Oli

Right - Ive been away on Holiday, and I'm now back to get this finished!!

So I have a SCSI external CDROM, and an external FD0, I can boot from the FD0, but it won't detect the CDROM because it isn't there.
when I try and boot from the CDROM, it doesn't want to know!

I have created a boot disk (Slackware 10.1) using the SCSI.S kernel with my desktop, and will be trying that tonight - my questions are:

where can I find a list of all the possible names for this drive? (e.g. SCD1, SR0, etc)

is there an auto mount option I can put into the bootdisk to look for the CDROM when I boot using the FD0 which is placed in the same caddy during the boot time?

Can I install the boot disk to the HDD if all I can do is boot from FD0 so I can then place the CDROM into the caddy to try and detect it during boot up?

I know all these questions might seem a bit basic, but this is the first time I have found myself using SCSI

thanks

Oli